U-5 Class Submarine (Austria-Hungary) - Service Career

Service Career

U-5 and U-6 were both commissioned into the Austro-Hungarian Navy by April 1910, and served as training boats through 1914, making as many as ten training cruises per month. During their early years, each boat was demonstrated to a foreign naval delegation; U-5 to a Peruvian detachment in 1911, U-6 to a Norwegian group in 1910. At the beginning of World War I in August 1914, U-5 and U-6 comprised half of the operational U-boat fleet of the Austro-Hungarian Navy.

In the three years after SS-3's March 1911 launch, Whitehead's attempted to sell the boat to the navies of Peru, Portugal, the Netherlands, Brazil, and Bulgaria, before the Austro-Hungarian Navy rejected an offer for the second time. With the outbreak of war, however, the Austro-Hungarian Navy purchased the unsold submarine to quickly bolster its fleet. Although provisionally commissioned as U-7, she was commissioned as U-12 in August 1914.

By late December 1914, all three of the U-5-class boats were based at the naval base at Cattaro and all took part in combat patrols. Between the three boats, they sank five ships with a combined tonnage of 22,391, captured seven ships, and damaged one dreadnought. U-6 was the least successful, sinking a single ship of 756 GRT; U-5 was the most successful, sinking four ships with of a combined 21,604 GRT, including the French armoured cruiser Léon Gambetta. U-12 damaged, but did not sink, the largest ship torpedoed by any of the U-5 class when she hit the French battleship Jean Bart on 21 December 1914.

Of the three boats of the class, only U-5 survived the war intact. U-12 was sunk with the loss of all hands when she hit a mine near Venice in August 1915, while U-6 was scuttled by her crew in May 1916 after becoming trapped in an anti-submarine net that was a part of the Otranto Barrage. U-5 herself sank after hitting an Austro-Hungarian mine during a training exercise, but was raised, repaired and recommissioned before the war's end. U-5 was ceded to Italy as a war reparation and scrapped in 1920.